Georgy Leonidovich Pyatakov (Russian: Георгий Леонидович Пятаков; 6 August 1890 – 30 January 1937) was a Ukrainian revolutionary and Soviet politician.

Born in Kiev Governorate, Pyatakov was expelled from St Petersburg University in 1910 and later that year joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

In 1918, he was part of the Left Communist party faction, and during the civil war served as the first chairman of the Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government of Ukraine and in several military roles.

In 1927, he was expelled from the party, led by Joseph Stalin, for his membership in Leon Trotsky's Left Opposition, but recanted and rejoined in 1928.

Pyatakov (party pseudonyms: Kievsky, Lyalin, Petro, Yaponets (Japanese), Ryjii) was born 6 August 1890 in the Cherkasy district in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, now modern-day Ukraine, where his father, Leonid Timofeyevich Pyatakov (1847–1915), was an engineer and director of the large Mariinsky or Horodyshche Sugar Refinery [ru].

Arrested in June 1912, he spent a year and a half exiled to Siberia with his partner, Yevgenia Bosch, in the village of Usolye, Irkutsk.

On 30 November 1916, Lenin wrote to his confidant Inessa Armand, complaining that "neither Yuri (Pyatakov), quite a little pig, nor E. B. has a particle of brain, and if they had allowed themselves to descend to group stupidity with Bukharin, then we had to break with them, more precisely with Kommunist.

[3] Pyatakov and Bosch remained together until she committed suicide by self-inflicted gunshot in January 1925, after hearing that Trotsky had been forced to resign as leader of the Red Army, as well as in pain from her heart condition and tuberculosis.

He was one of Vladimir Lenin's fiercest opponents on the national problem regarding both the course to be followed towards the socialist revolution as well as the Bolsheviks' peace settlement with Germany.

During the party conference in Petrograd, in May 1917–at a time of growing support in Finland for independence from Russia– Stalin put forward a motion in favour of self-determination of small nations, which Pyatakov opposed.

[6] After the October Revolution, in November 1917, Lenin called Pyatakov to Petrograd to take over the state bank, whose staff were refusing to release funds for the new government.

In January 1918, Pyatakov was one of the leaders of the Left Communists, who opposed Lenin's decision to end the war with Germany through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (signed 3 March 1918).

In protest, he resigned his post at the state bank and returned to Ukraine, intending to organise partisan warfare against the advancing Imperial German Army.

[1] At the founding congress of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, in Taganrog in July 1918, Pyatakov was elected as Central Committee Secretary.

He and his supporters on the left, who included Bosch and Andrei Bubnov, remained in control of the Ukrainian party during most of 1918, but the insurrection which they launched against the pro-German Hetman, Pavlo Skoropadskyi, failed.

In October 1923, travelling under the name 'Arwid', Pyatakov was part of the Comintern sent to Germany during the abortive attempt to bring about a communist revolution.

He was a signatory of The Declaration of 46 in October 1923, and in the debate that followed he was "their most aggressive and effective spokesman" who "wherever he went easily obtained large majorities for bluntly worded resolutions.

[18][19] After Stalin had ordered the start of the campaign to force peasant farmers to move on to collective farms, Pyatakov gave a speech in October 1929 calling for "extreme rates of collectivisation" and declaring that "the heroic period of our socialist construction has begun.

"[20] But in August 1930, Stalin complained in a letter to the head of the soviet government, Vyacheslav Molotov that Pyatakov was a "poor commissar" and a "hostage to his bureaucracy".

He was in Kislovodsk at the time, but returned to Moscow, and met Stalin and other senior communists, who told him that several former members of the Left Opposition being held by the NKVD had confessed to being part of an anti-soviet conspiracy, and had implicated Pyatakov.

[23] Pyatakov was allowed to put his name to an article that appeared in Pravda on 21 August 1936, halfway through the first of the Moscow show trials, in which Zinoviev and Kamenev were lead defendants, declaring: "These people have lost the last semblance of humanity.

They must be destroyed like carrion polluting the pure bracing air of the lands of the soviets...",[24] but that evening the prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky publicly announced that Pyatakov, among others, had been named by the defendants as being involved in 'criminal counter-revolutionary activities, and was under investigation.

On the opening day of the trial Pyatakov told a story that while he was on an official visit to Berlin in December 1935, he secretly flew by private plane to an airdrome 'in Oslo' where he was taken by car to meet Trotsky, who was in exile in Norway, to receive instructions.

[34] Pyatakov's second wife, Ludmila Dityateva (1899-1937),[35] whom he married during the civil war, joined the communist party in 1919, was expelled in 1927 as a member of the Left Opposition, and reinstated in 1929.